ABSTRACT
In 1964 a chance discovery revealed a buried Roman sarcophagus, its mummified occupant, an eight-year-old girl, and the grave goods buried alongside her. Amongst these was an ivory doll, equipped with articulated limbs and a carefully carved portrait head. Similar dolls appear in other Roman tombs, all associated with the graves of young girls, and often accompanied by their own miniature grave goods, equivalent to those which equip the deceased. They have been read as the dead girl’s playthings, buried to bring comfort in the Afterlife, and as a potent symbol of the fact that the deceased had died before she could fulfil her social destiny as a bride. Yet the Grottarossa doll’s carefully delineated features are strikingly similar to those of the mythological figure of Dido, carved on the front of the sarcophagus it was buried within, and indeed, to those of the mummified girl herself.
Drawing on the close visual parallels between the Grottarossa doll, her owner and the mythological prototype of Dido with whom the girl is also identified, this chapter argues that prestigious ivory dolls found in tombs stood as alter-egos for those they were buried alongside. Valued both for their verisimilitude and for their imperishable material, these dolls became representative objects, taking on the identities of the dead girls they accompanied, and projecting, for their grieving families, all the hopes which had been frustrated by premature death.
